The City When It Rains

each of the other floors, this time with a flash. When he’d finished, he returned to the window and stared down a moment, his eyes drifting toward the place on the street where her body had come to rest. For a moment, he tried to imagine what she must have felt during the few seconds she’d fallen toward the street, wondered whether she’d felt her skirt lift as the air swept under it, or the cold rain on her face and arms, whether her eyes had taken in the sprinkled light of the surrounding city, or locked themselves instead on the small blue bundle toward which she hurled at terrific speed. He even swung out over the ledge, half his body dangling in the air, as he edged his camera downward, before realizing that without falling with her, he could not capture such a radical descent.

As he drew back, his eyes caught on something, a faint, pale fleck just at the border of his own peripheral vision. He bent down quickly and saw a small white button poised at the very edge of the window, teetering there shakily, as if still trying to decide. He stepped a few feet away, lowered himself down onto his stomach, and angled the camera so that the button seemed to be already half-tipped over the ledge. In his mind, he could see Julian nodding appreciatively at the picture that would result, smiling at the way it worked to sum everything up, a single torn button, just the right touch.

Kellerman looked surprised when Corman walked into his small office just outside the freezer room. “Forget something?” he asked.

Corman shook his head. “That woman,” he said, “the jumper. I want to check something else.” He took a small square of tinfoil, opened it on Kellerman’s desk.

“A button,” Kellerman said dryly as he glanced at it. “So what?”

“I found it near the window,” Corman explained, “the one she jumped out of.”

Kellerman looked up at him. “What’s your interest in all this?” he asked, this time more out of curiosity than cautiousness.

“To sell a book of pictures,” Corman said unemphatically.

Kellerman looked surprised. “A book of pictures? About some burned-out suicide?” He shook his head. “I guess people’ll buy anything, right?”

Corman wasn’t interested in discussing the commercial possibilities. “I was wondering if the button came off the dress she was wearing when she took the leap,” he said.

“Well, I guess I could help you with that,” Kellerman said. He eased himself from his chair and motioned for Corman to follow after him. They walked to the end of the corridor, then turned left into a room filled with tightly packed cardboard boxes. Kellerman snapped a clipboard from a peg at the door, flipped a few pages and drew his finger down a line of numbers.

“There it is,” he said. He looked up, scanned the wall of boxes, then headed off to the right. Once again, he motioned Corman along behind him. “It should be over here,” he said.

The box had been labeled with a Police Property decal, white background, blue lettering, all of it circling the outline of a badge.

“This is all I took off her,” Kellerman said, as he slipped the box from the shelf and brought it over to a long wooden table a few feet away.

Corman pulled the pasteboard flaps open. The dress was balled up in the upper righthand corner. He drew it out slowly and spread it across the table. It was white, just as he remembered, only with red piping along the hem, the two shallow breast pockets and the deep V-collar. There was a small tear on the front, low and on the right side, near the hem. A few slender threads hung from it. Four small white buttons ran from the waist upward toward the collar. The last one, which should have rested at the point of the V was missing.

“There’s where your button came from,” Kellerman said authoritatively.

Corman folded the dress neatly and returned it to the box.

“I don’t think the cops are handling this as a case anymore,” Kellerman said. “There’s no point in them working a suicide.”

Corman closed the box, then thought for a moment about what kind of shots might work for the book, a torn dress, a missing button, pictures that would do what Julian wanted, and which he now heard as a kind of frantic chant in his mind: Compel. Compel. Compel.

CHAPTER

TWELVE

CORMAN STILL HAD the button in his hand when he walked out of the morgue. For a while, he stood on the steps, glancing randomly about while he rubbed it slowly between his thumb and index finger.

He was not sure what he had, if anything, as far as the woman was concerned. At any moment everything could fizzle, and he’d be back on square one, with Julian shaking his head at another idea gone sour, and Trang circling overhead, and finally, Lexie staring at him from across the table, eyes level, mouth fixed, about to speak: Why should Lucy stay with you?

He felt a wave of anger pass over him and fired a few questions back at her. Why did you leave her? What about Jeffrey and his millions? What about crawling into the nearest lifeboat, money? What about the great feminist now comfortably ensconced beneath Jeffrey’s rich umbrella, thinking nothing, doing nothing except maybe casting a lustful eye toward the pool man once in a while?

He shook his head. His bitterness amazed him. And his unfairness. Rage reshaped the world according to its own wounded angles. He drew in a long, deep breath, like a diver trying for the bottom again, reaching for some impossible treasure, something he could bring up from the depths and hand to Lexie on the gleaming beach: Look what I found for Lucy.

He started down the steps, then stopped again, thinking of his father. Luther Corman. What a prize. He could imagine him in court, testifying for Lexie, answering her lawyer’s final question: Now, Mr. Corman, in light of your experience with your son, do you think he should retain custody of your granddaughter? He could see that unctuous, stricken face staring directly at the judge, tragic, mournful, Old Agrippa in a Brooks Brothers suit: Regrettably, no. He would say it just like that. Regrettably, no. And the judge would feel such pity for him. How could such a dignified and accomplished man have such an immature, wastrel son? Dignified? What about all those smarmy end-runs around the IRS? Accomplished? At what, besides sobriety and, as far as Corman knew, marital fidelity? As a father, he’d hardly existed at all. Lexie had immediately recognized that. “He’s like Neptune,” she’d once said. “When you reach out to touch him he dissolves.” But even in this, Corman thought now, Lexie had been a little off. It wasn’t that his father had dissolved, but that there’d never been anything there in the first place.

Again, he shook his head silently, stunned by his own anger, and wondered if perhaps it was the only emotion he knew all the way down to its appalling core.

Corman found Milo Sax exactly where he expected to, feeding a group of bickering pigeons in Hell’s Kitchen Park. Lazar had introduced them several years before, when Sax had still been working for the News. At that time, Pike had been anticipating an offer from the Washington Post and had started grooming Milo as his replacement, but Sax had blown it with a thoughtless reference to the fact that Pike’s oldest son had been living with a roommate on Christopher Street for a little too long than was altogether natural. “If my son was a fag, I’d damn well know it,” Pike had snapped back, cutting the line of succession in one quick slice. Sax had hung on as a steady shooter for a while after that, but the persona non grata status had finally worn him down, and he’d gone free-lance for a time, then drifted into idleness. Now, at forty-four, he already seemed old and slightly senile, as if, when he’d hung up his camera, he’d handed over part of his mind as well. He had a small apartment on 47th Street where he continued to live off the dwindling resources the last beats of an ancient trust fund were still able to pump into his hands. It was dank and smelly, and whenever the weather wasn’t too wet or cold, Sax usually headed for the park.

“Hello, Milo,” Corman said as he sat down on the bench beside him.

Sax arced a fistful of seed over the heads of the pigeons and watched them scurry toward it, gurgling loudly and flapping their wings. “First time I’ve been able to get out here in a couple days,” he said. “The rain’s been locking me in.”

Corman nodded.

Milo turned toward him. “I heard about Lazar. Best there ever was, Corman. You see him much?”

“I go up when I can.”